Question: What is the common good?

Transcript: I have always been suspicious of terms in that that come in the singular. Maybe there are, maybe we should think of common goods. We want citizens, we want our children to grow up in a world where there is physical security which terrorism calls into question. Physical security is one common good. Freedom, political liberty, is another common good. A much greater degree of social equality is another common good. Those are, to my mind, the crucial common goods, and, referring back to our last question, a culture in which larger percentage of the population is engaged at a higher level, that's also a common good.

Question: Why should citizens care?

Transcript: Well, because it is imagine a society. Switch to works of art. Imagine a society, which once existed, where Shakespeare’s plays were the ordinary entertainment of average Londoners. That seems to me to be something quite wonderful, so why shouldn’t, why shouldn’t the discourse of professors be of everyday interest to ordinary people? It produces something more lively, more interesting, more tense than commercial culture.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: Which philosophers have stood the test of time?

Transcript: Well, the major 20th century American philosopher was John Rawls, and he has had a very significant influence, although his name is probably not a household, a household term. But Rawlsian thought has had a significant influence in our law schools-- and the United States is a very law-focused country--a very important influence in our law schools and in political science departments. It has affected the debate, and after him I guess John Dewey was the other big 20th century American figure and his version of pragmatism and his conception of the political public and democracy. They have an influence. I don’t know; it’s not a measurable influence.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: Why does philosophy matter in a modern world?

Transcript: Well, we try to, at our best I think, we try to take the moral intuitions of ordinary people, the sense of right and wrong that prevails in our society, and we try to give it a systematic form and to test its internal tensions and possible contradictions and to apply it to difficult cases and then to suggest revisions as the cases required revision. And that kind of work, I think, even if it is carried out at a very high level of abstraction as it often is in academic philosophy, that kind of work tends over time to interact with the more ordinary moral conversation of humankind and to have some impact I think.

Question: Will philosophy remain relevant as the world becomes more integrated?

Transcript: It is possible that certain sorts of arguments that were local will become universal, the way in which the democracy argument is doing, because, although the universal. The way in which the democracy argument is doing, because, although the universal commitment to democracy is lipservice these days, lipservice is the beginning. Because if people have to pay lipservice, then they that means they have to talk about these values, and then so they give hostages to fortune, because then people can come along and say “well, you are pretending to be a democrat, so why, why is your rules so authoritarian and why don’t you allow this opposition news paper to publish” and so on. So that, there will be a tendency I think, if globalization is a long-term process, there will be a tendency to universalize these arguments, and then they will be, as with...there will be fundamentalist responses to reasserting some particular orthodoxy against this universal discourse.

Question: What is the greatest misunderstanding about philosophy?

Transcript: I think that there has been a tendency in the period that is called, intellectually, academically, post, the postmodern period. There has been a tendency for academic discourse to become increasingly esoteric and increasingly removed from the conversation of ordinary people, and I would like to see a countermove that brings academic discourse, generally--political science, law, philosophy, political theory--into a closer relationship to society, politics, to...well, what I have been calling the ordinary conversation.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Transcript: I don’t think so, no, because when I read the moral arguments that went on in ancient Greece or in ancient Israel, they don’t seem all that different. I’m not sure this is a realm in which progress--there is certainly nothing like linear progress from ancient times to modern times on any moral issue. There are ups and downs. Sometimes we get it right; sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we get it wrong for a long time, and then suddenly someone comes along and gets it right. I don’t, I know there are the neurologists who are trying to locate morality in the brain but--and I know nothing about the geography of the brain--but I am doubtful that the arguments are going to change.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: How do we identify ourselves?

Transcript: Well, we are complicated people, so, in no particular order, I am an American and a Jew and a professor and in Easterner and a fan of the New York Mets, and I had many, and very committed family man. I have many identities, and the United States has been for most of its inhabitants, a place where multiple identities are accepted and even accommodated, with some exceptions for race, I think most crucially. But for the immigrants it has been a place where you could be hyphenated American, so you could be Italian in many aspects of your cultural life; you could be an American in your citizenship and in your economic life, and the same thing is being true for Slavs and Jews and even those greater difficulty for Asian immigrants. So you want that we need a society--this is why I think of myself is a soft multi-culturist--we need a society that accommodates difference, without drawing hard boundaries for all of the different groups, so we don’t carry identity cards and the government doesn’t decide whether you are an Italian American either or Sicilian or something more complicated, because your mother was Italian American and your father was Polish American and then… The boundaries are fluid; these different identities are sustained by a core of--think of them as the core of activists, of committed people--and then there is a spreading periphery of people who identify more or less with the core and the periphery has no boundaries and it overlaps with other peripheries of other cores and that’s the way I think a decent society ought to function. And so we don’t have corporate identities and we don’t we aren’t represented exclusively as Jews or Italians or Swedes or Catholics or protestants or whatever. We don’t have corporate identities, but we can when we decide on how to vote. We can vote for a fellow Protestant if we want to or a fellow Catholic or the Italian American or not, or we can vote our ideology rather than our ethnicity or our religion and we have those options and nothing is required of us by the state.

Question: What are the standards for judging morality in different cultures?

Transcript: I defended the idea of thinking of morality in minimalist and maximalist terms. The minimalist morality is universal in character and it’s created by all of the interactions of people across cultural boundaries, so the moral theory of war has to be universal, because wars are fought across cultural boundaries and people have to be able to understand what they ought to do across those boundaries. And the laws of commerce have to be universal. We have to have some common understanding of theft and fraud if we are to trade across boarders which people have been doing for thousands of years. We need, because there are political interactions across borders, we need some kind of minimal political morality, whether it’s--increasingly now it is a morality of democracy-- but you can imagine something more minimal in which they were certain just simply certain rights that a government should not violate. And then when you try to design, say, a welfare system or an educational system, you find yourself having to attend much more closely to the cultural and religious commitments of the people who are going to be living in those schools or in that welfare system. And so there you need a maximalist conception of morality which will also be particularist. It will be particular to a place. That doesn’t--you can still stand outside and criticize it--and we know that sometimes that criticism is useful, and people will kind of think about it and maybe naturalize the criticism within their own system of belief. But I’ve argued, I have written a couple of books on social criticism that the best social critics are insiders.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: Is there a clash of civilizations?

Transcript: No, I don’t think so. I think there are too many clashes within each of the civilizations to talk about a clash of--it essentializes each of the civilizations to describe them--but it is true that when fundamentalists or zealots or orthodox or ultra-orthodox people take over a country, then there, they will repress the moderates and the liberals in their own camp and then we confront them, and that does look like a kind of us against them. But we always have to remember in those situations the people who have been repressed, all of the liberal and secular Afghans, for example, who survived the Taliban regime, but we didn’t hear from them while the Taliban were in power, but they're there and those should be our allies and, since we, since we always have allies in the other civilizations, I think it is a big mistake to try to describe that as a kind of war of unified cultures.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: What do you make of the global resurgence of religious alliances?

Transcript: Well, first of all it was entirely unexpected, especially by left intellectuals. We all brought into the theory of seculars, secularization. This was a long-term inevitable historical tendency. It was the product of modern science and education and democratic politics and--everything was going to set people free from religious authority and increasingly make religious belief less and less tenable, so we thought. And it’s possible that we may still be right over the very, very long run. Secularization seems to be a fact of life in Europe, except among the Muslim emigrants. Churchgoing is radically down and people who say they believe that those numbers are radically down. The New York Times yesterday published some recent poll data suggesting that though America is far behind Europe and we are caught up in the same process, and the number of people describing them as religiously, describing themselves since religiously unaffiliated has grown quite sharply in the past 10, 15, 20 years. Still, there has clearly been in Islam, in Judaism and among, and in Christianity, the rise of a new kind of orthodox or fundamentalism or zealotry, and in Buddhism also and in Hinduism. And in all of these cases it has been associated with right-wing politics and sometimes with violence against opponents, and that is a political challenge, a totally unexpected political challenge, to left, secular, liberal, politics. And we're all fumbling with how to with how to respond.

Question: Can democracy and theocracy be reconciled?

Transcript: No, I mean those are...of course God doesn’t rule in the world, at least we never see him doing that or her or whoever. It's always people who claim to be the agents of gods, so every theocracy is an oligarchy of zealots or priests or religious sages or an oligarchy of people who claim to speak for God. And an oligarchy is not a democracy, and there isn’t any path from one of those religious oligarchies to democracy that doesn’t involve the overthrow the oligarchs.

Question: What economic or political system works best?

Transcript: Better than all of the others. I think that the European social democracies have come closest to achieving a socio-economic system which is just for the greatest number of its subjects, and that means a highly regulated free enterprise system. And what social democracy did to capitalism in the 19th century, domestically, is what we now need to do to global capitalism. We need to find a way to impose the same kind of constraints which means welfare constraints and guarantees of labor rights of organization, union constraints, safety and environmental constraints. We need to impose those kind of restraints on global capitalism as they have been imposed in the best social democratic societies locally.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Transcript: Yes, I think, I think Darfur is the obvious place, and what's important to understand is it doesn’t require the United States. The Vietnamese army stopped the killing in Cambodia. The Indian army stopped the killing in East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. The Tanzanian army shut down the murderous regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. There was the UN force of 5000 soldiers in Rwanda when the killing began, and the commander of that force told the Secretary General "I can stop this" with 5000 soldiers who did not have all of the high-tech stuff that American, the American army deploys. Humanitarian intervention can be... you can work with a division of labor, doesn’t have to be the United States. Other regional associations other, other countries can do this work, and we should sometimes provide political support, we should sometimes provide logistical or financial support, but it doesn’t have to be American troops and clearly, in the Sudan, we cannot invade another Muslim country. We are in no position morally or politically to do that. So would have to be somebody else who went into Darfur.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Transcript: Terrorism is the murder of innocent people. It is the deliberate killing of people who are known not to be government employees, government agents, soldiers, police, the deliberate killing of people like you and me, and I think it is in our self-interest as well as in--well, first let me say, it is our self-interest to deny that it can ever be justified to kill you and me and people like us--and, since most people are like us, it's in everyone’s self-interest to deny that terrorism can ever be justified.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: Has the U.S. handled enemy combatants appropriately?

Transcript: Well, the Bush administration seems to have created a new legal category of an illegal combatant or an enemy combatant who isn’t entitled to prison-of-war status which has many rights. If you capture a prisoner of war, it's a contract. The prisoner says "I will give up fighting" and you say "I will provide you with benevolent quarantine for the duration of the war." And benevolent quarantine is a legal status that has rights. We’re denying, the Bush administration denies that the people captured, the people being held in Guantanamo; they are not prisoners of war. They are also not criminals, suspected criminals or accused criminals because accused criminals also have lots of rights in our political system. They have a right to an attorney; they have a right to know the charges against them; they have a right not to be tortured; they have all kinds of rights. And so there is this new status of a person who has no rights, or no rights that fit into any of the paradigmatic condition, legal condition, legal statuses. And that’s immoral, illegal, unconstitutional I am sure and playing wrong. There can’t be a human being without some rights in the world. There can’t be a legal status which doesn’t entail some set of rights, so, if in fact terrorists are, if there are good reasons for treating terrorists not like prisoners of war, then we should treat them as criminals, as murderers and we should bring them into trial. If we are unprepared to treat them that way, then we should treat them as prisoners of war. Or if there are very good reasons for doing, so then you create a new legal status, but it has to be a status with rights, with clearly recognized rights that make sense in the international community, because we don’t operate alone, and we want our soldiers when captured, and also our secret agents when captured, to be treated as people with rights.

Question: How can the situation be rectified?

Transcript: Well, you have to shut it down, and you have to bring the people who are currently being brought before military tribunals, you have to bring them before civilian courts. I think that’s the best thing to do. Or you have to bring them before military tribunals that are overlooked, that are watched and supervised by civilian courts.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: Was 9/11 a declaration of war? Was the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan justified?

Transcript: I think we were justified in going. I thought that was a just war, a war of self-defense, because the people who attacked us in New York in 2001 were not simply a terrorist organization harbored in Afghanistan the way various Palestinian terrorists have office buildings, have offices in Damascus. It wasn’t like that. The Al Qaeda was an active partner of the Taliban regime and they had received from the Taliban regime, the benefits of sovereignty, crucially a territorial base, a place to organize to train, to train their people. And so that was what justified the war, it was the partnership of Taliban and Al-Qaeda that made it just for us to aim at overthrowing the Taliban regime. Where we went wrong--because we obviously did in Afghanistan--was in not committing the resources to political reconstruction that were necessary after the war that we fought and after the war against the Soviet occupation which we funded and supported. After all that we had responsibilities in Afghanistan which we did not fulfill, and we’ve now dragged NATO in--and it is a very good thing I think that NATO has come in--but even with the NATO forces there is not the commitment to political and economic reconstruction in Afghanistan that there should have been.

Question: How can the U.S. fulfill its commitment in Afghanistan?

Transcript: An A is a very unlikely in the given contemporary politics. Once again, we need an American government that is internationalist in its perspective and multilateral in its decision-making and that means they have to, we have go to the Europeans and say "this is a joint responsibility. We don’t have to run it. We will participate. We will provide more than we have been providing, but please join us in a major effort to achieve political stability for the Kabul regime."

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: Was going to war with Iraq necessary or just?

Transcript: I thought it wasn’t and argued against the war that we fought. I did think that the regime of constraint which had been established after the First Gulf War, which involved the no fly zones and the UN inspectors in the country and the embargo on the import of arms. I thought that was a just regime and that we should have sustained that regime. We needed to improve the embargo. We needed what Colin Powel called smart sanctions, because the sanction system was hurting ordinary Iraqi civilians, but there should have been a way--and I have spoken to some of the people who were running the embargo who say there were ways--to deal just with weapons and not to prevent food and medicine from reaching the people. So that system of constraint which I think was working--we now know that it prevented the Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction. That system of constraint should have been sustained.

Question: Does regime change justify the war?

Transcript: No, there are a lot of governments that need to be changed in the world. We could all make a list of governments that wouldn’t be missed, but the use of military force across an international frontier; that needs to have a greater justification than a dictatorial or oligarchic or tyrannic or even a brutal government. If there is mass murder in progress, I think it is just to go in. I think we should have gone in to Rwanda. I think somebody should be doing something in Darfur. I think it was right for the Vietnamese to go into Cambodia and shut down the killing fields. But the mass killing was 12 years in the past, in 2003 and it was an odd thing for the United States to say “oh, I just remembered they were killing people 12 years ago we better invade.” And that's...you really need to justify a war. You need a very extreme situation, and that didn’t exist in 2003, because the regime of constraint was setting very, very powerful limits on what Saddam could do. And it was a successful regime, so the war was unnecessary and an unnecessary war is an unjust war.

Question: Are American citizens morally responsible for the Iraq war?

Transcript: I don’t think that responsibility...I think jus ad bellum, the justice of a war, and therefore the violation of jus ad bellum, aggression, is the crime of political leaders. I don’t think it makes much sense to hold a civilian population responsible. First of all, a very substantial portion of the civilian population voted against the government, and many of those who voted for the government did so for reasons that had nothing to do with foreign policy. They were voting their domestic interest or their domestic ideology. They weren’t even thinking about the Middle East. They probably couldn’t locate Iraq on a map, so I don’t like that kind of broad diffusion of responsibility. I think it’s best to think of responsibility in quite narrow and particular terms.

Question: What must happen for the U.S. to pull out of Iraq justly?

Transcript: If the people who want us to stay like the Kurds or the Sunni chiefs are right, that is if our staying there holds is in some way connected to their physical security, then we have to stay for as long as that connection holds. If leaving means that the Kurds will once more be subjected to a massacre or that the Sunnis who now find themselves having ruled or having supported at despotic regime for sort of so long, now find themselves a small minority--20% of the country--subjected to radical persecution or ethnic cleansing or massacre, that would be a very very bad outcome. And if our staying there helps to prevent that we need to stay there. At the same time, we need to set some terms for disengagement, and we have to inform the Iraqis that on some, over some time frame, perhaps vaguely defined, we are going to leave and they had, have to begin, and we have to hope there neighbors will help them, begin establishing a stable arrangement. It’s not likely to be in anything like the democratic political regime--a stable arrangement which guarantees the security of the different groups and we have to be working toward that kind of stability. It’s a minimalist goal now. We are not going to create a Swedish social democracy in Baghdad. We are not going to create...we are not even going to create a Chicago politics in Baghdad. It’s going to be something in from our perspective, from the perspective of liberal Democrats, it is going to be something much worse, but it can’t be disastrous for the Iraqi people given what we have already subjected them to.

Question: Should citizens feel guilty for not joining the army to end the Iraq war?

Transcript: I don’t think you have to go over there, and I also don’t think it makes a lot of sense to be marching, shouting "bring the troops home right now." We did that in Vietnam. In Vietnam we came to the belief that a victory of the north was, had been, effectively ratified, chosen by a majority of the Vietnamese in the south and that they would establish a tyrannical government, but it would be a government. And there would be some kind of stability and we had no business continuing the war. But in Iraq withdrawal doesn’t mean there will be a government, even a tyrannical government. It probably means a kind of civil war,and not the easy kind where you have two sides fighting. It could be a civil war with many sides, because nobody in Iraq has only one enemy. It is a much more complicated and much more frightening political situation, and so unilateral or immediate withdrawal is wrong. So what we should be defending is something..it's very hard to march with a banner. It's a very complicated politics that we should be defending, a politics of a commitment to disengage but not until we have, so of speak, gotten the permission of the people who are most at risk of being killed.

Question: Is that signal possible?

Transcript: Well, I think at some point, if we manage to find the right things to do, there will be a growing sense among Kurds and Sunnis and that they are okay, that they are not in imminent danger and we will, they will tell us.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Transcript: Well going in this was a classic case of a just war. There was an active aggression invasion of a country, the invasion of a member of the U.N, and we organize the coalition to resist and throw back the invasion and then we stopped. In classic Just War Theory that’s what you are supposed to do. You are supposed to defeat the aggression and repel it and then stop. You don’t march...you don’t have to overthrow the aggressive government; that’s for the people to do if they want to do it, and we stopped. But then we incited a rebellion inside Iraq leading people to expect, since we had an army right there, that we would help the rebels, and then we didn’t. And there was mass murder. Saddam, who had been unable to fight against the coalition army was perfectly capable of fighting against then slaughtering his own people, and he did on a very large scale in the south and later in the north … so, yes, we behaved very badly and some of the troubles that we've had in Iraq after ’03 come from the loss of confidence of trust that we produced by our behavior in ‘91.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: What is Just War Theory?

Transcript: Yes, well, first of all, it’s a very old theory because no government in any high civilization, and in many low civilizations, no government will send young men into battle to kill and be killed without offering some justification for what they are doing. And so Just War Theory is simply an argument about what justifications make sense. What are the plausible justifications and how do we as citizens judge what governments do when they go to war? And the Greeks had arguments about when to fight and how to fight and there are biblical accounts of arguments about when to fight and how to fight, and in the Islamic tradition there are arguments. Just War Theory, as a doctrine, it comes out of catholic moral theology in the Middle Ages. So this is an ongoing and a very long ongoing argument and in---among us the argument has a double character. There are arguments about when to go to war, when is it justified. This is called jus ad bellum, the justice of war, and we hang on issues of aggression it is right to resist there an attack, just as you could resist on the city street if you were mug you could fight back and that would be adjust miniature version of a just war. And it’s also just to come to the aid of the victim of aggression, as you might do on a city street if you were brave enough, and that would be a just war. And we have also begun to think that when there is a massacre going on inside a state, when a government is massacring some minority or maybe even not a minority, a majority of its citizens, the way the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime did, that it is just to go in and stop it by force if necessary. So those of the just occasions of war and then there is justice in war, jus in bello, justice in the conduct of war, and that hangs mostly on issues of non-combatant immunity, of discrimination, of attacking only other soldiers, so it hangs on a very old idea that war is a combat between combatants from which non-combatants should be shielded. Non-combatants means women, children, old men. It means medical personnel. It means religious officials. It has even meant, in some circumstances, the merchants who sell weapons to both sides were in some accounts  treated as non-combatants who nobody should attack, but basically for us it means the civilian population, is not, should not be, subject to attack in the war.

Question: What are the new challenges to Just War Theory?

Transcript: One challenge which I have written about is to add to jus ad bellum, the justice of war, and jus in bello, justice in war, jus post bellum, justice after war. Once you have defeated the other side, what are your obligations in this, what might be a devastated country? It might be a country--if you overthrowing a regime like the Nazi regime in Germany and you've occupied the country--what constitutes just behavior then? And that’s an issue obviously raised--well, we thought it was raised in Iraq--except we never reach the post bellum. We started to talk as if it were after the war, but it wasn’t and isn’t. So in Iraq we are still confronted with in bello, arguments about the conduct of war. But that’s an important question, and you can see it in the way in something like the NATO protectorate it in Kosovo. We fought a mini war with the Serbs and Kosovo was then put under a kind of NATO protectorate with UN authorization and then what should NATO do? We have soldiers in Kosovo, what should they be doing? What constitutes a just conduct when you are occupying somebody else’s country?

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: Which candidate has the best foreign policy positions?

Transcript: No one is talking honestly about Iraq, and it’s very, very hard to say, what our responsibilities are given the unholy, or maybe its holy, mess that we have created in Iraq. We need to shout “help.” We need to ask for help from the Europeans. We need to open negotiations with the Iranians. We need to be talking to the Turks, and we need to be planning our own disengagement, but any politician, any democratic politician who claims that we are going to withdraw from Iraq in the near future is just lying to the American people, because the Kurds don’t want us to withdraw, the Sunni chiefs don’t want us to withdraw, the Shiite government doesn’t want us to withdraw, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Israelis and the Turks don’t want us to withdraw, and all of those allies of the United States in the Middle East are very much afraid of anything that looks like defeat for the United States. And a withdrawal on the schedule that has been proposed by Obama and Clinton, I suppose, although they have given themselves a lot of loopholes but withdrawal on that schedule would be a defeat in fact it might a rote. And so nobody is going to do that. And how to plan at a disengagement--because we have to get out--how to plan a disengagement that doesn’t leave everyone that we have worked within the Middle East crying; how to do that is enormously difficult, and none of the candidates are talking honestly about those difficulties.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: What is the most dangerous idea in this campaign?

Transcript: Well, McCain is increasingly trying to run as a Republican after having been a maverick, almost an independent for the past 8 years, and therefore he is saying a lot of things which I think are wrong and dangerous. He is defending tax cuts that he voted against. He needs--if he’s to win the nomination, and if he is to run as a Republican candidate--he needs to convince the base, the Republican base, that he is one of them having not been one of them for some period of time. And so he is saying a lot of things which I hope he doesn’t believe. He is defending tax cuts that he voted against. He is no longer as passionately against torture as he has been in the past. He is defending a policy on anti-welfare politics which I also hope he doesn’t believe, but all of those would be dangerous because they are the continuation of a Republican program that has brought the country into state of radical unfairness and inequality

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: How would you rate the presidential candidates?

Transcript: I don’t think that political philosophers have any special insight into everyday politics. As I suggested before, most political philosophers are more interested in philosophy than in politics, so that doesn’t give them any handle on what’s going on in the world. And my experience in the academic world is that academics are not much more intelligent about everyday issues than ordinary citizens. They are more knowledgeable; they can call up historical references, but that doesn’t mean they get things right here and now.

Question: As citizen, who is your favorite candidate?

Transcript: I suppose John Edwards was the candidate most committed to an organized campaign to reduce inequalities in American society, and he didn’t get very far this time. I suppose I think that the Hillary Clinton is, of the remaining two, the most like a European social democratic politician, a policy wonk with the lot of ideas about concretely what ought to be done and with all the compromises that social democratic politicians always end up making. And Obama is from my perspective a relatively unknown quality. I suppose he is a centrist Democrat and any Democrat—centrist, right or left--is going to change the way America has been moving in the last eight years maybe in the last 40 years. But how committed he is to change--I know he is committed to the rhetoric of change--but how committed to actual concrete change on the ground and how prepared he is to fight the necessary fights which will be very partisan and very ugly and won’t permit him to ride above partisan conflict the way he has been doing in the campaign, how prepared he is for that I don’t know.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: What are the greatest inequalities in the American political system?

Transcript: Well, no, obviously, we have a society of growing inequality. If you look at the graphs just of income and wealth distribution--in the time that I was growing up America was becoming a more egalitarian society, from sometime in the 30s to the late 60s. It was slow progress, but it was progress toward a more egalitarian distribution both of income and of wealth. Since then we have become in radically unequal, and some of the disparities are a quite amazing. And those kinds of inequalities of wealth and income are convertible into inequalities in the legal system, inequalities in the political system, inequalities in the educational system. We know what wealth can buy in the United States or anywhere where it is set free, as it is standardly in a capitalist system, so we are not an equitable society, and we have not become...and we have become less rather than more equitable over the last decade.

Question: How can we close the income gap?

Transcript: Well, it is both. There has never been a period of increasing equality without social movements from below, like the labor movement in the 30s and 40s, pressing for greater equality. And there is also never been a period of increasing fairness or equity without a committed government, with measures like social security or maybe as we will see in the next years national health insurance. Those are the kinds of measures that governments can take and ought to take to provide a base below which no one is permitted to fall.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: What is justice?

Transcript: Well, again coming at this from left perspective, I connect justice with equality. So legal justice means equality before the law; it means that wealth or family connection or celebrity fame doesn’t bring you special treatment, which means legal justice is rare in the world, but that’s the conception of legal justice. Political justice means one person one vote; it means right of opposition; it means free speech, freedom of assembly; it means all of those features of citizenship that make a democratic politics possible. And social justice is equality of opportunity, the openness of the social system, and of the economic system to ambition and competence, and it means the absence of such great inequalities as distort legal justice and political justice.

Recorded on: 2/27/08

Question: How do you define yourself as a political theorist?

Transcript: Ok, well, first of all, I am a political theorist, who is interested in politics, which isn’t true of all political theorists. In the academic world, there are a lot of political theorists who are interested in political theory and not particularly in politics. And they write about other people’s political theories and I have tried not to do that, but always to write more directly about political life, and I am interested in war having grown up during World War II, and having participated in the anti-Vietnam war movement in the 60s. I am interested in justice partly because of civil rights, and partly because that’s a steady concern of left politics. I have been interested, because I am a Jewish American, or American Jew, in multiculturalism and pluralism and all the issues revolving around assimilation, integration, separation and so on. And those are the things I have mostly written about.

Recorded on: 2/27/08